Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, treated the oldest person to be cured of a blood cancer and then achieve remission for HIV after receiving a blood stem cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine today demonstrates that older adults with blood cancers who receive reduced intensity chemotherapy before a stem cell transplant with donor cells that are resistant to HIV may be cured of HIV infection.

Paul Edmonds, 68, of Desert Springs, California, is the fifth person in the world to achieve remission for and HIV after receiving stem cells with a rare genetic mutation, homozygous CCR5 Delta 32. That mutation makes people who have it resistant to acquiring HIV. Edmonds is also the person who had HIV the longest—for over 31 years—among these five patients.

Known as the “City of Hope patient” among these five patients, Edmonds received a at City of Hope on Feb. 6, 2019, and is now considered to be cured of leukemia. Edmonds stopped taking antiretroviral therapies for HIV nearly three years ago and will be considered cured of HIV after he has stopped taking antiretrovirals for five years.

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This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

Researchers from NYU discovered that classical computers could keep up with or even surpass quantum computers in certain circumstances. Classical computers can get a boost in speed and accuracy by adopting a new innovative algorithmic method, which could mean that they still have a future in a world of quantum computers.

Many experts believe that quantum computing is the future, and that we are veering away from classical computing, primarily because classical computers are significantly slower and weaker than their quantum-based counterparts. However, turns out that quantum computers are delicate and prone to information loss, and even if information is preserved it is difficult to convert it to classical information necessary for practical computation.

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A new approach has allowed researchers at Aalto University to create a kind of metamaterial that has so far been beyond the reach of existing technologies. Unlike natural materials, metamaterials and metasurfaces can be tailored to have specific electromagnetic properties, which means scientists can create materials with features desirable for industrial applications.

The new metamaterial takes advantage of the nonreciprocal magnetoelectric (NME) effect. The NME effect implies a link between specific properties of the material (its magnetization and polarization) and the different field components of light or other . The NME effect is negligible in , but scientists have been trying to enhance it using metamaterials and metasurfaces because of the technological potential this would unlock.

The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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A new kind of implant could one day make it far easier for people with type 1 diabetes to manage their disease. The insulin-making implant is a mixture of transplanted islets cells and medical technology, inserted just below the skin in a person’s arm, and if it perform well in clinical trials, it could potentially last for years.

The challenge: Insulin is a hormone that our bodies use to convert sugar in our blood into energy. People with type 1 diabetes don’t produce enough (or any) insulin — if left untreated, this causes dangerously high blood sugar levels, leading to serious health issues or even death.

Regularly checking blood sugar levels and injecting synthetic insulin when they’re high is the most common way to treat type 1 diabetes, but it isn’t the only way.

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